One useful piece of advice from the book "C++ Coding Standards" was to separate your Coding Standard from a Style Guide. (Rule 0: Donít sweat the small stuff. (Or: Know what not to standardize.)) Minimizing scope of variables belongs in a coding standard, indenting belongs in a style guide.

The interesting side effect of this, is that most of the items in the coding standard are accepted by most of the developers without argument. Meanwhile people would argue for years on the curly placement from the style guide.

I've seen this approach used to good effect at a couple of positions. Even the style issues could be standardized once everyone could admit that any consistent style was better than having multiple styles in a large code base. (And, since it was just a guide and not a standard people seemed less likely to fight to the death for their "one, true indent style".)